What’s untrue? If it turned out the GBA and DS didn’t print money, Nintendo would be done. They did go after a different market with the Wii. Gamecube was sold at a loss at launch, but the Wii wasn’t. (Cite, 3rd paragraph)
Sometimes I imagine a fight between Reggie and Major Nelson. Most people would automatically say Major Nelson would win because he’d bring out some sort of BFG from Halo. But Reggie has an aura of super fucking awesomeness that would simply obliterate any of his enemies.
/misses Yamauchi, who has a list of awesomely inappropriate quotes beaten only by Prince Philip
Being sold at a loss doesn’t mean the GameCube wasn’t still profitable, which it was. It still sold nearly as many units as the Xbox did, and of course, millions upon millions of software. Not to mention Nintendo had, at the time, over 4 billion in cash saved at the time.
There is absolutely no indication the GameCube could have tanked them, even if the GBA hadn’t been as popular as it turned out to be.
Nintendo hates its fans so much (presuming the OP is true, which it probabbly isn’t) becasue Nintendo isn’t in business to satisfy its hardcore fans, it is in business to make money, which it does better than anybody else.
No piece of hardware Nintendo has ever produced has been sold at a loss beyond the first six months of the GC. It’s just not how they do business.
Every GameCube sold after that made a tiny profit and all the first party games Nintendo sold on the system (VGChartz lists 26 Nintendo-published GameCube games that sold over a million copies) were big moneymakers for the company. Nintendo was never in any danger of going out of business.
But at the same time, it’s been pretty clearly stated that they didn’t want to go head to head with Sony and Microsoft again. They weren’t winning that. In terms of building hardware with crazy tech specs, to satisfy slavering technophiles, they weren’t going to compete. So they didn’t.
Well, right. While Nintendo was still making money, they wanted more of it.
Also untrue. Sort of.
While Nintendo said they didn’t want to go toe-to-toe with the 360 and PS3, the GameCube and original Xbox were neck-and-neck for their entire lifecycles. It was only at the very end that the Xbox pulled ahead by a half million units or so.
If they wanted to, they could have done it and might have even still won. But as Red Barchetta said, they wanted to make a play for the super mega bucks that comes with the expanded casual market.
You can’t be serious. I’ll bet youd have said the same thing about color tv back when it first hit too right?
It’s called progress dude. Go watch some VHS tapes or laserdiscs or something.
The problem with “HD Gaming” isn’t that HD games don’t look better than SD games–they obviously do, and all things being equal, I’m sure we’d all rather have HD than SD.
The problem is that all things end up not being equal. What we all too often seem to get are games where a team of 200 artists create awesome looking cutscenes and make sure that all of the pores on the main character’s nose look right, and about half a dozen guys spent a weekend working on the gameplay, you know?
I suspect that is the basic idea behind any Nintendo comments about this–not so much a “Bah, HD sucks” idea as a “Fancy graphics aren’t needed to make a great game.”
+1
While first noting that Black and white —> color was an infinitely larger jump than SD —> HD, my answer is still not much beyond “meh”. A lot of my favorite movies are in black and white. Shockingly, they didn’t need blu-ray or HD to tell the story they were trying to tell. Edward R. Murrow somehow managed to bring an end to McCarthyism without one shade of color on his program. Imagine that. How did he do it? And talk about lo-def. His audience couldn’t even see his pores or the tartar on his teeth. Not to mention the poor bastards were watching on 13 inch tubes. How on Earth did that generation survive to produce us? It’s nothing less than final proof of god. Mother nature alone could not have prepared them for such horrors.
And somehow Michael Bay, with all the bell and whistles, fails to make a good movie every time he tries. Why aren’t his movies good? They’re in HD. It doesn’t make any sense.
Make every game as fun as the average SNES game and maybe, just maybe I’ll start worrying about graphics. Even then HD will still be far below my radar.
Just for the record Cave Story was probably my favorite among games I played in 2010, and no I don’t seek out games with sub-par graphics, it just coincidentally had primitive graphics and ruled.
Bit.Trip Runner was number 3 or 4.
The 1080p screenshots coming out of the Dolphin emulator demonstrate that Nintendo is as crazy as Cisco about their stance on HD. This one is a particularly good example of how HD could improve the audience’s connection to the protagonist, since you’d be able to read facial expressions. Never mind just making it feel less like you’re playing a game. Nintendo doesn’t care though, since they just want to sell cheap hardware to 80-year-olds. That’s why all of their technical features are the worst in the class. Worst online. Worst storage. Worst digital distribution. Worst sound. Worst graphics. You can see it in the attach rate. The mobile side isn’t really any different, it’s just less obvious since they lack competition. The DS is well behind the iPhone in all the same categories, even with the 3DS in a few weeks.
You’ve unknowingly hit the nail on the head for why Nintendo doesn’t care as much about HD graphics as Sony or MS does. They want you to be playing games. Nintendo doesn’t care about a movie-like experience (some developers within Nintendo do, but Nintendo as a company doesn’t). Stylized graphics is the company’s signature.
Can’t argue with these.
But I can argue with these. The Wii uses generic SDHC cards as it’s storage medium. While it’s not a “hard drive” per se, it’s more cost effective and better than the 360’s proprietery hard drive setup.
Also, the Wii Shop Channel is no better or no worse than Xbox Live (sorry, no experience with PSN) when it comes to buying games online. Even acknowledging that some people consider it the worst is like saying that 10 is bigger than 9.999999. You’re right, but no one really cares.
Attach rate is a more or less meaningless stat. But even going by the latest attach rate numbers I could find, the Wii is only a game behind the PS3 and Xbox 360. But wait! The Wii is packaged with Wii Sports (and lately, Wii Sprots Resort as well), so when you consider that, the Wii is neck-and-neck-and-neck with both other systems when it comes to attach rate.
Comparing the DS, a handheld system released in 2004 (which has remained unchanged since then(, with the iPhone, a mini-computer that was released in 2007 (with subsequent annual upgrades) is stupid.
I would argue that “doing almost as well as the original Xbox” isn’t really a very good mark of success. Nintendo doesn’t have Microsoft’s level of capital. The original Xbox was MAYBE a break even proposition for MS. It could be argued that Nintendo didn’t have the resources to push a nextgen Nintendo console the way MS managed to push the 360. And the 360 needed a lot of pushing.
I would also like to argue with the “HD=all” crowd a little bit. Part of the problem I perceive with HD games right now is what they do to game development budgets. We have this absurd association, in the game space and other places as well, that somehow making something prettier makes it better, and that shiny=good, and that’s… just not true. I’m not even sure it necessarily has been proven thus far to add anything to do an HD game instead of an SD one. Yes, you can go on about facial expressions and “connecting to the character” but that’s all hypothetical - do facial expressions ACTUALLY help people identify more closely with the characters? It’s not really clear. Certainly, people didn’t have any trouble identifying with 16 bit sprites. One can in fact make the opposite argument with just as much supporting evidence, namely, that characters that are LESS precisely visually defined (such as the aforementioned sprites) are EASIER for people to identify with and connect with because it’s easier for people to project the characteristics they want to see onto them.
Similarly, most people actually more or less tune out the level of detail in most modern games. When you’re getting shot at in Call of Duty, are you appreciating the texturing on the terrain or the lighting effects on your gun? No. When you’re trying to execute a 50 hit combo in Blazblue, are you appreciating the smooth animation and the high resolution on the sprites? No. Fundamentally, once you get over the initial “Whoa.” factor of high rez graphics, they become background and you no longer notice them.
It is fundamentally clear, however, that high rez graphics are a lot more expensive, because you have to add all that detail, or the reviewers will pan you for your game being ugly. 
An additional point to bear in mind is that even now, a significant portion of the population lacks an HDTV (My lazy google search indicated that as of 2009, that was around 30%, so it’s probably lower now.) but it was much much higher back when the Wii came out. And those numbers are for households that contain AN HDTV. Which doesn’t necessarily mean they want to connect their game system to it rather than the old SDTV that’s probably still in use somewhere in the house. Will the next gen Nintendo system have HD support? Probably. Are they in any hurry to launch it? No, they’re too busy printing money.
You want your games to feel less like games, and I’m the one who is crazy. Makes perfect sense. I guess Casablanca felt too much like a movie, which is why Transformers 3 is necessary.
Question: what the hell is a “friend code”? Must be an online thing (I don’t do that).
That’s not what I remember and their sale figures look more like this. I’ll focus on North America only.
Total sold:
Gamecube: 12.94 Million
Xbox: 16 Million
That’s quite a bit more than half a million units.
I doubt any 3D/HD video game will give me as much enjoyment as this did growing up. 